Film Details

Side Effects is many things, and finally becomes a full throttle thriller moving ahead at great pace and no little intricacy.

Mother of God. Is this the end of Rico? (Edward G. Robinson as Rico in Little Caesar, 1931)

Ever since Steven Soderbergh burst upon the cinema universe with his Cannes award (the Palme d'Or and the FIPRESCI Prize), winning low budget Sex Lies and Videotape he has been the most consistently interesting and unpredictable of movie makers.

From the indie style of Sex Lies and Videotape through the noir thriller The Underneath (1995) to the best movie Jennifer Lopez ever made - or the best directed role - in Out of Sight (1998), the B-movie thriller The Limey (1999) to the all- conquering Erin Brockovich (2000)(Julia Roberts is another actor who should forever sing Soderbergh praises!) this is a writer director who never stops still for you to work him out.

And so on, right up to the Graham Greene-like intricacies and international terrors of Traffic (2000), this protean figure of post modern cinema has cut a swathe through genres, ideas, political agendas and even (with the Oceans trilogy) fooled around to enormous success with ole 1950s Rat pack mythologies like no other director. OK, make that three directors and then some!

But now he says this is his last movie! He wants to paint....

As for Side Effects, it is many things, and finally becomes a full throttle thriller moving ahead at great pace and no little intricacy. It's also something more: a political agitprop piece about the pharmaceutical industry right up there with Le Carre's The Constant Gardener.

The film rolls as Emily Taylor's (Rooney Mara) husband Martin (Channing Tatum) is sprung after serving a 4-year prison sentence for insider trading. Shortly afterward, Emily drives her car full bore into a concrete wall in an apparent suicide attempt. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), her court- appointed psychiatrist, fears for her safety, but he agrees to release her from the hospital as long as she settles in for regular shrink sessions with his good self.

Now the movie shifts gear into a fierce analysis of the 'feel good' pill syndrome.

Emily tries a series of anti-depressant medications (who woulda thought there were so many?), but none of them work. Jonathan contacts Emily's previous psychiatrist Victoria (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who suggests that Jonathan put Emily on the drug 'Ablixa'. And now the movie does indeed swerve into a dark mystery and a genuine film noir: but who's guilty? And what was the crime?

Soderbergh and his longtime screenwriter and collaborator Scott Z. Burns have created a brilliant and mesmerizing tale of a pill dependent society gone mad and a murder that you never see coming and will get no hint of here!

Don't walk away from the movies, Mr Soderbergh. Side Effects proves, yet again, that you're a true and rare modern cinematic master...when comes such another?